November 6th

I hope there will be a lot of interest in our conference on November 6th.

The programme is being slightly revised to incorporate some new speakers. In Ireland now, there is quite a lot of research and activity that crosses between economics, psychology and neuroscience at various segments of the Venn Diagram. Professor John O'Doherty's lab on decision-making in TCD is the major addition of recent times. In Geary, we have a number of different projects including projects on intertemporal decision-making, expenditure measurement, well-being and so on that integrate psychology and economics in attempting to understand important questions. A number of people at the Institute will be presenting on November 6th. We have also started undergraduate courses in behavioural economics in both Trinity and UCD that I taught and in general it was the best teaching experience in my career so far with lots of very interesting class discussions.

Stephen Kinsella in UL has set up an experimental economics lab since the last conference and will be presenting the first experimental results from this lab on the 6th. Richard Roche and Jonathan Murphy from NUIM will be presenting findings from EEG studies of decision making. Peter Lunn from ESRI will be presenting findings from an IRCHSS-funded study on loss aversion. Rowena Pecchenino will be presenting on economics and identity. Gerard O'Neill, of Amarach Research will present on findings from a monthly study of well-being and expectations being conducted in the Irish population.

Marcel Das, head of CentER in Tilburg will present on the MESS project, which is one of the world's largest social science projects based around the Dutch LISS panel. It is one of the best examples of real interaction between economics and psychology in the world and is leading to a large increase in the amount and quality of data available to social scientists. Arie Kapteyn is the Director of the Labour and Population Division at the RAND Corporation. He is a legend within Economics, and a pioneer in the development and use of subjective data in economic applications. He is also a very good and clear speaker and always someone who teaches a lot to the audience in his talks.

I hope anyone who reads this blog feels very welcome to attend this event even if only for part of it. We hope that as well as the talks there will be a lot of discussion among all the participants about where the interactions between Economics and Psychology might go both nationally and internationally. From a national perspective, it is important to ask whether this now huge global literature should be having more of an influence on how policy is formed in areas such as health, financial regulation and others core areas of policy. We hope this event will help further this discussion.